The Business of Self-Publishing
No Free Rides for Indie Authors
Stories shape our view of creative industries—this hot take cuts through the façade of indie freedom. What sacrifices have you made on your publishing journey?
Share your experience and let’s engage in the debate!
So you wrote a great book that you’re really proud of and now you want people to read it?
Doable.
Oh, you wanted lots of people?
Less doable.
Ooohhhhh, you hoped you might make a little money from the sales of that book?
Utterly laughable.
In a world that has globalized every industry, it’s not easy to be an independent anything anymore. Despite the proliferation of corporate offerings like Etsy that aim to empower the “little person,” Amazon has all but eliminated most other US-based supply chains, making them the go-to source for nearly everything. In the weeks before we left Minnesota, it took effort to locate a handful of seemingly commonplace items, ultimately using Google’s “-Amazon” to filter the listings...
I have no doubt that there are ways to find what you’re looking for without buying it from Amazon, but you are going to pay more and wait longer. I have a long standing theory of cost: you pay for it in money or pain. Usually applied to things like hiring movers, the American consumer’s mind has been carefully attuned to seek out fast and cheap.
They’ll elect a rapist if they think it’ll get them cheaper eggs.
Setting out to write my first book, I thought the hard part was going to be putting the story together. Don’t get me wrong, that bit didn’t come naturally and took a lot of effort, but it was all down to what I could squeeze out of myself and the time I managed to steal from my full time job and home life. I found the process of writing enjoyable, especially when the floodgates opened and I saw that I could, in fact, create.
The day CALLED released, it didn’t appear everywhere. It wasn’t on the tip of most people’s tongues, William and myself excluded. We’d done several weeks worth of advertising on social media sites, curated a schedule of character art and blog posts to build up to the big release. We got decent traction on the content but, it turns out, most social media likes and comments do not lead to purchases.
That’s another step.
A great many of the independent author crowd publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, an incredibly powerful platform with a lot of great reach. Through KDP, books can be printed on demand and extended to the Kindle Unlimited library; however, neither of these options are particularly beneficial to the author financially. Amazon takes a huge chunk out of the profits for items that they wholly manage on the author’s behalf. I’m not saying Amazon should offer everything for free, but it is pretty absurd how much control they have over the financial aspects of book distribution even if you don’t use them to publish your book.
Being a newb, I went through BookBaby to produce and distribute my debut novel, CALLED. Overall, the process was painless and I am very proud of the finished product…except for the fact that it’s January 2025 and I’m just now seeing the sales data from September 2024 coming through. Several months’ delay in reporting to the accounting dashboard, meaning Amazon has essentially had an interest-free loan on paying out my profit and I get a better sense of how my book is selling by looking at their sales ratings than I can from my own sales dashboard.
As I’ve been exploring options for my second book, TAUGHT, I don’t want to bow to Amazon’s monopoly on the indie publishing game but I would like for people to read it. I’ve been looking into a myriad of other options that are less expensive than BookBaby but more independent than Amazon.
I can format my book myself - Vellum’s $250 price tag pales in comparison to BookBaby’s formatting service.
If I only offer eBooks, I can save a fair amount off the list price - the difference in materials is shocking and let’s face it, paper isn’t the medium of the future. I know everyone is concerned about the ability of the billionaire-controlled platforms to revoke a user’s license to a book that is banned; however, there are EPUB distributors that allow users to have the actual file as opposed to delivering a license for the content to their account.
I’m not an expert, by any means, but in exploring I have found Lulu to be a viable option moving forward. Using their platform, users would get an EPUB of my book that they can keep on their devices. For the purposes of demonstration, I’ve reformatted my debut CALLED to be re-distributed (with corrections and a few things I was too scared to fight for in the last few days before final proof approval) and you can see that it is a pretty decent deal for me:
Eight bucks a book!? Who am I, Jackie Collins!?
$10 is absurd to expect anyone to pay for an EPUB but I am using a round number because I am more interested in looking at the Distribution Fees. At the same price point and for the same amount of effort as Lulu is putting forth, Jeff Bezos is pocketing $5.70 which leaves me less than half of my own distribution…
Sure, Bezos is the one who’s trapping the customers and Amazon has managed to corner the market, but in order to be promoted within the Amazon-sphere, a book needs several hundred reviews so that the system “knows” who will like it and can target them. It doesn’t seem to me that $5.70 is a worthwhile finders fee for a reader that I have to send to Amazon to make the purchase in the first place. After paying $570 in distribution fees, will Amazon’s system “learn” enough about who buys my content to recommend it to more people and get me more copies sold?
I could spend that $570 on things like a writer’s residency, working with an independent copy editor (something I wish I had not skipped the first time), or hiring someone to make pretty character art and bookmark swag!
At least with Apple Books, the per copy revenue is higher but why on earth is it different per currency? Please don’t answer that, pedants.
Since none of the indie author distributors I’ve looked at will let you set prices by channel, I can’t make the book cost more on Amazon or Apple Books to offset their cut. Before TikTok bent a knee, I was planning on setting the book prices sky-high and distributing directly through their shopping interface where I could offer a discount that would bring my profits down to the same as if they’d shopped through one of the bigger channels.
I can’t stop people from shopping on Amazon, but I can make it the more costly option. I can offer a coupon through my distribution that would allow my readers to keep their $5.70 AND get my book all while supporting me and cutting out Amazon!! The trouble is that there’s no way for me to explain that to them anywhere but my own website (and here). I suppose I could the description could say something like “to stick it to Bezos, visit my website and save on the billionaire tax” but I imagine that would get caught in a review somewhere…
The other nice thing about TikTok was that there was an audience I could explain that to but after nearly losing my lunch at seeing the message thanking you know who, I deleted the app and because Apple doesn’t want to cause any trouble, it is still not available for me to download again. In the few months I spent on that app, I built a base of more than a thousand followers and made some really great connections with content creators who are excited to promote my books.
It gave me direct access to my audience and I suppose that’s what Amazon is “offering” for the $5.70, but it comes with a whole lot of other tradeoffs. For starters, it is funding authoritarianism. Their union-busting, poor working conditions, insane amount of waste, and creation of imaginary demand for cheap plastic garbage should be more than enough; however, it is their monopoly on shopping that’s the end of my proverbial rope.
Restricting the visibility of offerings to whatever Amazon is willing to show a given user is not a free market. It’s an echo chamber that promotes whatever is most advantageous to that retailer rather than anything that might benefit an early-career author, minority-owned small business, or the true mood reader. I stopped shopping on Amazon after the election when I saw an ad promoting the sale price of On Tyranny…with Prime shipping!
In CALLED, I imagined a world where the government and industry merged to create a nation run like a business where each citizen is not an individual, but a capital investment grown to maturity and used to its most advantageous purpose.
Honestly, it felt dystopian when I started writing in 2022…
Thank you for reading! Wanderlust & Wordplay offers a blend of humorous expat memoir 🌍, serialized mystery fiction ✍️, and dystopian sci-fi 🧬
As an Indie author who has published two books, I have kind of given up on the idea that I will ever make any money. I share your view of Amazon. I haven’t found my audience either here or in the wide distribution world, although I distribute through IngramSpark POD. I’ve made the most money through direct sales. My first Novel, published in 2023 has won a couple of awards. I advertised it through FB, Amazon, and Google. Tried to garner reviews, but failed. I think on Amazon it has 20! I know it’s a good book, as is my flailing second novel, so clearly quality is not the determining factor. Selling books is just tough! Thanks for sharing your experiences.